Ubisoft: We Showed Female Hostage in Rainbow Six Siege Demo To Engender Sympathy

Ubisoft totally gets the point of female representation in video games, I see.

Ubisoft has found itself in the midst of a storm regarding female characters (or the lack thereof) in all of its video games recently, and they haven’t exactly handled it all that well. Now, this latest statement by them, which was made in an entirely different context, will probably make things much, much, much worse for them on that front.

“I know some people asked about the hostage in the demo. I mean, when we did that design we felt a lot of empathy with the hostage,” technical artist Oliver Couture told Rock Paper Shotgun. “We wanted people to want to protect her. If the hostage gets killed a team loses the game, so we wanted players to care about the hostage so that’s the design we chose.”

Wow, Ubisoft, just… wow. You couldn’t get any more patriarchally condescending even if you tried, could you? At least their next statement makes it a teensy bit better. Just a little bit, but still.

“But we’re also gonna have male hostages. That’s part of the plan,” he confirmed.

It’s one if the reasons that the British Army doesn’t allow women on the front line. Men are genetically programmed to protect women. It’s not “patriarchally condescending” it’s tens of thousands of years of instinct.